Giant panorama of Tokyo from the Tokyo Tower

Jeffrey from 360 Cities sez, "I have spent the last few months working on the Tokyo Tower Gigapixel. This is the second-largest panorama I have ever made, but it is my #1 favorite overall. (Here is the biggest one - and previously: 1, 2, 3, 4."

The image is made from around 8000 photos, shot from the roof of the lower observatory of the Tokyo Tower, with a Canon 7D, Canon 400mm L 5.6 lens, and a Clauss Rodeon gigapixel robot head tethered to a notebook. Sound like a lot of gear? It is... I was unfamiliar with this particular setup so the shooting was even more challenging than normal. That means I failed on the first try - the first day, 4 hours of shooting, was mostly for nothing. I went back a few days later but was only permitted to be there for two hours, which is an order of magnitude less time than I would like for shooting such a thing, especially if I have traveled all the way across the world just to do this. I shot everything again (from 3 different places around the circumference of the tower) and things went much better, or so I thought. When the time for stitching finally came, these shots didn't all fit together properly, either. The camera had missed a couple shots here and there. In the end I had to combine images from both days and stitch them all together on top of each other. This is not recommended practice at all, but it did end up yielding a complete image. A couple more months of post-processing and finally I got a full 360° image. Still there are a few issues as you can probably see if you zoom in and look around... but overall I am really happy with this image. It was shot on a very clear day, and it was on a weekend in September so there were a lot of people in the streets.

The one thing that I find funny about these images is that until now, nobody, including the author, has actually seen the entire image at 100% detail. It will be a long time before any single person will have seen the whole image!